Some of my writing pieces featured in magazines and guest blogs.

DNA—the biological information-storage unit and the mechanism by which traits are passed on from generation to generation—is more than just an essential molecule of life. In the chemical sense, the nucleic acid has properties that make it useful for nonbiological applications. Researchers are now using DNA to store massive amounts of data, for example, including books and images, a Shakespearean sonnet, and even a computer operating system, with data encoded in the molecule’s nucleotide sequences. At an even more fundamental level, DNA is a critical building block of nanoscale shapes and structures. Researchers have created myriad nanoscale objects and devices using the nucleic acid, with applications in biosensing, drug delivery, biomolecular analysis, and molecular computation, to name but a few.

DNA-based information storage has many advantages including longevity and ability for highly dense storage, and is more suited for archival storage of data. However, reading only portions of the stored message is hard since entire libraries of DNA strands have to be sequenced. In our recent paper in Nucleic Acids Research, we use DNA nanoswitches for short term storage of data, where the information is "written" in different states of the nanoswitches. The written information can be erased and rewritten, with our strategy also providing a write-protection function (to prevent erasing of specific bits). The stored data can be easily read-out using gel electrophoresis.

DNA nanodevices provide visual outputs of events that occur at the molecular level. In my recent research published in ChemBioChem, shape-changing DNA nanostructures are used to recognize and react to specific input DNA strands, with the resulting output graphically displayed using gel electrophoresis.